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I largely agree with @2rafa, but another important consideration is the dysgenic spiral we’re seeing intelligence in many first world countries. The Yuddite argument is generally to take it slow. However if you see our civilization and intellectual capacity going into decline due to stagnation, why would you argue to slow it down? What makes you think our children will have a better ability to align AI, in the counterfactual where we lock it all down?
I’m always surprised that folks in the AI doomer camp seem to be so tech positive, but don’t see the downside of restricting one of the most useful technologies we’ve ever created. If we slow down the economic engine too much, we’ll have a much harder time with AI alignment in my view.
Like missing out on "... a Mars visit, and also a grand unified theory of physics, and a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and a cure for obesity, and a cure for cancer, and a cure for aging, and a cure for stupidity ..."? ("The Power of Intelligence", Yudkowsky, 2007; now in video form!)
There's an important difference between "don't see the downside" and "see the downside, but also the upside, and concluded that the latter is larger". Even if their conclusion is wrong, the doomers are all very much in the second category. Nobody thinks superintelligence is some kind of evil magic that can never be harnessed for good; they just think that at this rate it's too unlikely to be.
You know what they say about surprise - it's your brain's way of letting you know that something you believed wasn't so. In this case, I'd suggest "they're coming to conclusions based on affinity for general categories rather than analysis of specific distinctions" might be the belief to ditch.
I personally think restrictions would do more harm than good, though. We'll get to AGI eventually regardless, and the more hardware overhang that's built up when we get there, the less crazy a rapid "foom" scenario looks. Our best odds now aren't to get the whole world to coordinate until we have proven safety via mathematical theory without experiments, but rather to hammer on safety as we improve capabilities and hope our results extrapolate to superintelligences too. "Hope our results extrapolate" might be in vain, but not so certainly as "get the whole world to coordinate" or "proven safety via mathematical theory without experiments".
I think Dase and others in the "let it rip" side of things would argue that we will already miss out on things like that by taking the conservative/retreat route as things currently are.
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There are many ways we can address dysgenics, and we have tons of time to do so. Even if we stop AI now we're probably going to see massive increases in wealth and civilizational capacity, even as the average human gets dumber. Enough that even if some Western countries collapse due to low-IQ mass immigration, the rest will probably survive. I'm not sure, though!
That's a great question, but I think in expectation, more time to prepare is better.
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